my mom continually told me what she loved about me… Not just told me she loved me, but what she loved in me. It was never based in what I did and measured by acts and deeds which I’m sure informed her feelings in those moments. It was always based in who I was. These same things were things that she loved about her savior. She would tell of things that she loved about Jesus and then tell me those were the same things she loved and saw in me. It communicated very clearly to me the love she had for her Father and her love for me. It also told me who I was. I wasn’t defined by sin. A fresh word had been spoken about me… I was the very image of Christ. I would mess up and fall but the gospel that was shared with me by my mother was drawing, pulling, inviting me to my better self, my true self. Just as Paul continued to call Christ’s followers, saints, holy, and sanctified so that they knew that their identity was never in check when sin entered their hearts. My mother gave me that gift. The gift of knowing my true identity was always intact. The gospel to me was hearing who I really am and letting that pull me into a better future. “let us live up to what we have already attained.”

I was always running through windows and jumping out of doors
Hoping in the things that weren’t ever there and never seemed to be
Even when I smiled at her she looked at me like I was crazy
Never quite understanding that it was hope
You see hope tastes like wanting… Wanting better, or more, it’s not always pure
Not always right
It’s giving up on the present because we know right now is broken
Maybe hope will fix tomorrow
So I gave up on hope wanting now
Tired from looking for pennies in the cracks of the floor
Finding dust, dirt and bleeding finger tips

But hope is informed by her beauty… the beauty of what’s known
What’s been embraced through our aroused intimacy
When they come to take you away and empty you
Tell them you emptied yourself
For the beaten heart
Traded it for a beating heart
Risking pain for hope… hope that bleeds through wounds
Rooted deep beneath the tree of experience
Fading from green to red to orange to dead
Resurrecting with spring
But not before a long deep nothing
hope was there in pain only because now had to crash into not yet

How tall is the door that welcomes our hearts
The door that seems to keep us out with promises of bleeding
The god that seems to speak from within and yet gets so confused from without
A Lord that wreaks of the American dream only because I do
Can we enter
shape seems to mislead and weed out broken dreams
And grabs fear from the deep places
That once stood clean in the shadow of innocent children
Children holding onto their bicycles with baseball cards in the spokes
Ready to jump the highest jump with sound of a motorcycle
Can we enter
Remember when we tried to talk under water
Our words filled with fluid and air pockets that bubbled to the surface
Misunderstandings that made us laugh and say… no no no… one more time
Remember when tomorrow came at the crack of dawn ready for exploration
Now it seems to wait for a cup of coffee
Energy that seeps out of the cracks of the day
We know what we can’t see so why bother to open our eyes
Can we enter
Into the smile of a child
Into the laughter of hope and fearlessness
Can we enter
Into the love of a mother that only wants her child to embrace the simple understanding that there is more… always more… always more mystery
So keep looking…
Go through the door of uncertainty
Open your hands and let the blood drain
The blood that made you human wasn’t leaving much room
So let it go
And enter

So, I just got an email from my brother-in-law about how he and my sister and their kids will be coming back to the states from Turkey because his father is not doing well. He has a tumor growing on his esophagus. He’s been on a feeding tube for a week because the tumor won’t allow him to swallow food or drink.  In the email Christian mentioned something that struck me as interesting.  You see, since his dad is on the feeding tube it means that he hasn’t tasted anything for over a week.  I love food… I mean, really love food.  I love crazy types of food.  I love consistencies, flavors, smells, i mean everything that goes along with food.  Christians dad is getting nutrients from the feeding tube and is staying fed and alive, but no taste…

Psalm 34:8 says “Taste and see that the Lord is good, blessed is the man who trusts in Him.”

Taste and see that the Lord is good…  Taste…  When we taste food we experience food.  We get to see if it something that we want more of.  We get to see if it something that will satisfy us.  We can live our lives without experiencing God.  We can stay alive and not indulge in his Spirit.  Never recognizing the flavor that is within us.  Experience is so important to how we live our lives.

A favorite quote of mine is, “You can study God expertly in His parts and miss Him entirely in His being.”  In order to know God we must experience him… taste him.  We can know all the right things and have all the right answers and miss him completely if we’ve never tasted him.

So drink in a sunset.  Indulge in a meal with friends and family.  Get drunk with laughter.  Taste that he is good.  Experience the lover of our souls.

“Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way.  Many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if you listen carefully, you can hear her breathing.”

-Arundhati Roy

So I’ve been thinking about this story of the paralytic since Joshua spoke on it Sunday.  I find it to be interesting because I wonder how I would have reacted.  In fact I can’t help but think that I would have been a little upset when I came to be healed and Jesus forgives my sin.  It’s like when you ask for something that you want for Christmas and your mom buys you what she thinks you need instead.  Oh thanks, underwear.  I mean really.  Wouldn’t you be a little upset? 

Why would Jesus forgive the man’s sin?  The more I’ve thought about it the more I can’t help but think that it’s because of meaning.  Jesus came to bring meaning.  He brought meaning to everything he did.  He took a regular meal and packed it full of meaning.  He took a simple story and filled it with meaning.  He wanted people to see meaning and purpose in what seemed mundane.  When Jesus forgives the mans sin he adds meaning to his life.  

Sin is what seperates us from God.  Sin is what feeds us hell when we need the kingdom.  Seperation leads us to wanting the mundane instead of the extrordinary.  When Jesus came he brought the Kingdom with him.  Jesus says to seek first the kingdom and all else will be added.  When Jesus forgave the mans sin he gave him a new perspecitve on meaning.  The man could now see heaven.  Hope was restored.  Everything now could just be added.  Jesus wanted to overflow heaven on earth so it could fill the hell.

I guess it comes down to your idea of redemption.  What adds meaning?  Healing or restoring?  Would there be meaning in the mans healing?  I don’t know.  But I do know that meaning was restored through the forgiving of his sins.

Have you ever had a problem with perspective?   My perspective seems to get in the way all the time.  It’s hard for me to see anything when I allow my perspective to rule my understanding.  Now I know that my perspective is valuable and may even have truth to it but sometimes it makes my mind think that it’s done… That it has all it needs to put the story together.

Let’s say that I’m in the park and a man runs by screaming his head off.  I literally see him running through the park with his hands in the air screaming at the top of his lungs… Now, I have my ear phones in so I can’t hear what he’s screaming but he looks crazy.  Soon after a woman comes up to me to see if I’ve seen her husband and she explains to me the very man that I saw running like a mad man.  I tell her I did see him but he seemed to have gone crazy.  At that moment another lady says that she saw the man as well but she heard him screaming the words Charlie get back here.  At which the wife then explains that Charlie is their dog.  But then a mail man walks up and says that he saw the man but he was running after a child that had just run into the woods.  And that’s why the police were there.  They were trying to find the missing child.  Then the police come up and say that they’re looking for a thief that was seen running through the park earlier.  After a few more people tell their account we soon find out that the man I thought was crazy was running after a dog that had run into the woods.  The child was chasing the dog because the dog had taken the child’s stuff animal.  The police were there because someone thought that I looked like the thief… Go figure. 

We all had different perspectives.  We all had a different idea of the truth and what had happened.  We all had seen with our own eyes what had happened.  I could have ignored everyone and just believed that the man was crazy.  I saw him running like a crazy man.  The woman could have believed that Charlie was a child or anything else for that matter.  I might be a theif…  We can choose ignorance because of our perspective.  However, we can add meaning.     

Jesus asked…”who do you say I am?”   Perspective added to the pool of meaning.